"Extra-legal"

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic posted about White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's reflections on his "inartful" comments. I commented:

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novel and potentially extra-legal counter-terrorism campaigns overseas

"Extra-legal" is the wrong, mealy-mouthed word, dude. Illegal is the word you're looking for. As in "crime".

has fleshed out assertions of executive power by the previous administration

As in "war crime". As in "unconstitutional".

Maybe the "professional liberals" are mad because they're tough on crime, unlike those of you who are happy to trade away one eternal liberty after another for successive temporary securities. Maybe we're values voters who thought we were voting our values -- *serious* values, freedoms that are actually worth fighting for -- and aren't seeing them displayed.

Cheney, libertarianism, rape

ugh, what a subject line.
publius wrote about The Method of Cheney's Madness. I said:

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Let me third (or fourth) the "tribalism, not idealism" explanation. *Everything* becomes a tribal marker for them, which is why they're only playing well in the white South, the most tribalistic subculture in the US (see Albion's Seed for details). There are no questions of morality (torture), or science (global warming), or common sense (Obama's citizenship) -- there is only Tribe. And the more contrary to morality/fact/sense an assertion is, the better it is as a marker for Tribe.

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[someotherdude rec'd: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States and The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America]

ooo, book recs. Thanks, someotherdude!

I really realized the tribalism angle in a discussion at Rod Dreher's, where he was horrified to find that conservative Christians were *more* likely to support torture than liberals are. A commenter there said that he was from the South, and that he thought a lot of people around him don't "really" support torture, but they would hear the pollster's question as really being about group identification, not the purported issue, and answer accordingly.

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John Holbo at Crooked Timber writes about Megan McArdle and Rationing again: For all ponies, there is some pony, such that you won’t get that pony.♥ I wrote:

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alkali:

A problem with arguing with libertarians at the level of abstraction is that libertarians have a comparative advantage in abstracting away the actual facts of the world in favor of the freshman-microeconomics models they have concocted in their heads.

Not just economic models. The working definition of libertarianism I have come up with, by observation, is “libertarians do not believe humans are social animals”.

So for instance: if you don’t have any money, you shouldn’t be entitled to any medicine is quite reasonable if the sight of people dying for want of medicine doesn’t bother you, and if you can assume it doesn’t bother anyone else (their families, for instance). If you’re a true *individualist*, the collapse of any sense of community is all to the good, because “community” is a delusion.

What most libertarians *do* seem to believe in is *corporations*. I have never been able to figure out if corporations, in their minds, are replacing communities, or if they’re kind of like individuals only cooler (that is, richer and more powerful).

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Martin James:

Libertarians view taxes or laws as the product of “gangs”—aberrations—and believe that humans are naturally self-reliant and independent. They do not seem to recognize that the natural state of a human is in a social group, and that concepts like “property” are functions of particular social relationships, not Platonic ideals.

Either way, I still don’t understand how corporations fit into the libertarian world-view. They talk a *lot* about individuals versus the Big Government, but don’t seem to notice the actions of Big Corporations.

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At TigerBeatDown, Sady and Amanda talked about who doesn't believe No means No (answer: conservative older women). I left a comment (which seems to be in moderation with everyone else for the weekend):

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I don’t know if I have the fortitude to actually click through and read the studies, but I think you young ‘uns don’t completely grasp the Old Ladies’ position.

They were taught that a Good Woman *never* says Yes, except during her wedding vows. That’s it, the one time Yes is an acceptable answer.

So they were in the position where “No” had to do duty for both “no” and “yes” — both for any gentlemen they want to communicate with, and to themselves. How do you say “Yes” when you can’t admit you want to, and when everyone will think worse of you if you do? Well, one way is to say “no” in a lot of different ways, hoping to communicate subtextually.

The other way, frankly, is to get raped a lot. But you can’t admit you were raped, because as we know that makes you practically a slut. What the younger generation thinks of as “rape” is part of these Old Ladies sexual experience, but they’ve been getting by for decades by denying it was so. Rape is something that happens to *other* women, Bad Women, what happened to me was just the way the world is, only to be expected.

So IMHO for a lot of those Old Ladies what happened to the young woman in this case had actually happened to them, and for pretty much all of the Older Ladies it had happened to someone they care deeply about (mother, sister, friend). If they accept that lack of consent is rape, it casts a pall of horror over their own past, bringing up *way* too many things they’re dealing with by not thinking about.

Ted Kennedy; health care; incompetance

Within you may find comments on: Ted Kennedy at Ta-Nehesi Coates'; incompetence as a strategy, at Crooked Timber; health reform, at Obsidian Wings.
Ta-Nehesi Coates, who's a young whippersnapper, asked How did he get that lion of the senate title? What were the nuts and bolts he screwed with to get business done? What's the why and how?. I said:

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I think the main reason Kennedy could accomplish so much was that he was an hereditary aristocrat. His life is a textbook example of how that is both good and bad.

Because he came to his position essentially by inheritance, he didn't have to fight for it. He could afford to be principled, but he could also afford to be magnanimous.

Even very conservative Republicans could work with him, because what's more conservative than hereditary aristocracy? Indeed, he wasn't just an aristocrat, he was a *celebrity*, the very highest class of American society, rarified even by the standards of the Senate Millionaire's Club.

The good part of being an aristocrat is *supposed* to be being reared to public service; care for the downtrodden also *supposed* to be one of the emblems of Catholicism. In Kennedy's case they actually worked, so he was an aristocrat in a very Catholic mold, blending the sense of duty with the awareness of not being particularly "elect" in the Protestant sense. In Catholicism, "sinner" and "saint" are not opposites nor mutually exclusive.

And of course, being an aristocrat -- and more than that, a celebrity -- meant that Kennedy's ability to *do* things could not be destroyed by Chappaquidick or anyting else. His hereditary position could not be undone or unmade, so he could get away with things.

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[in reply to an accusation of ignorance]
You misunderstand me. I admire Kennedy *deeply* and have for many decades.

But his virtues -- magnanimity, firm principle, kindness, friendliness -- are not enough to explain why *Republicans* got along with him and were willing to work with him. Virtue and strength of character aren't enough; he also needed power, the kind of unassailable power that came from his hereditary celebrity.

The contrast to GWB, of course, is painful and acute. GWB is the poster boy for all the ways aristocracy is a bad idea -- and how of all the hereditary aristocracies, the worst are the ones where the aristocrats think they've *earned* their positions.

TNC's question is *how* Kennedy could do so much. I don't think personality, principle, or a tradition of collegiality are enough to explain why Hatch and others were willing to work with Kennedy -- I think it's that he was, in an American way, of a higher social class than they were. He was able to use that power for good, but the foundation of his power was just as unearned as any X-Men's. (X-Man's?)

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Karen in DC wrote:

.. after Kennedy got in trouble for cheating at Harvard, he ENLISTED in the army and served as a private, not as an officer as his older brothers had. So, he had to LEARN how to engage with people from other classes, including live and work with them and take orders from those who were not of a higher class. He had a lived experience as a "regular" person that his brothers had not.

Thanks for the info, Karen, I didn't know that. I'm betting that experience -- and being so far down on the sibling totem pole -- did indeed help give him experience seeing things through other people's eyes.

Nonetheless, his position in public life began and depended upon his lineage -- as the Charles Pierce bio a few years ago said:

If his name were Edward Moore . . .

He would not have served so long, if he'd served at all.

If his name were Edward Moore, Robert Bork might be on the Supreme Court today. Robert Dole might have been elected president of the United States. There might still be a draft. There would not have been the Civil Rights Act of 1991

This is the dream of aristocracy, as good as it can get: someone of such high, unearned position that they can be thorougly magnanimous. Alas for Plato, it doesn't happen often enough to justify the whole system, but at least we can recognize it when it does.

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Henry at Crooked Timber posted on incompetance as a signalling device, linking to Scott McLemee's review of Diego Gambetta on Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, and makes comparisons to the Italian academic scene:

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message * I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. * In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity

I said:

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Now *that’s* a theory with broad applicability, if you know what I mean.

I recently read Deer Hunting with Jesus, and was thinking about Sarah Palin and the glorification of ignorance and ill-education in what David Hackett Fischer calls American “Borderer” culture. Gambetta’s theory makes the light bulb go off, for me.

If education is a ticket out of poverty or marginalization, then poor and marginalized people will (rightly) see it as disloyal to the group or the family, unless it goes along with a strong tradition of supporting your parents and extended kin. Proud ignorance is proof that you won’t leave your kin behind—because you have no-where else to go.

Do any of you know if Gambetta talks about such signalling by Japanese yakuza? They are famous for using tattooing and self-mutilation as demonstrations of loyalty and commitment.

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von, one of the conservatives at Obsidian Wings, posted about health care reform and his support for Wyden-Bennett. I wrote:

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Having read a brief overview of W-B, von, I have a question:

Does any other country do this?

I personally have had *enough* of American exceptionalism and insisting on being the first penguin off the ice floe. There's no point in having a big world if you have to keep inventing the wheel to prove how Special we are.

I also am quite appalled at the idea that the solution to our problem is to give more money to insurance companies. Step right this way for yet more regulatory capture and market failure!

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I will also add that the reason I am for single payer is that I abhor means testing. To people of means, means testing may seem "only fair", but in practice it is tiring, degrading, confusing, privacy-destroying, and taxing in every sense. It also inevitably involves huge, invasive bureaucracies and the pushing of much paper, things to which von is deeply opposed.